Ethical Porn

For Couples Who Tune In and Turn On

By Corinne Farago

Watching other people have sex is tucked deep into our DNA. We’re drawn to it out of curiosity, the thrill of voyeurism, the excitement of arousal, and the all time big driver in our human bodies, the desire to procreate. Watching others have sex signals our desire to have sex ourselves, since time immemorial.

As a sex and relationship coach, I see how porn tends to pit partners against each other and leads a couple down the road of sexual shame, secrecy and mistrust. It doesn’t have to be this way.

I’d like to perhaps widen your definition of porn, and share some thoughts how it can be used as a tool for sexual communication and exploration.

Whether you defend porn or deplore porn, you’ll find heaps of opinions that support you, and large swaths of people who vehemently disagree with you. Porn is not an argument to be won, or even a problem to be solved. Pornography is something to be discussed, understood, and for those who are inclined, integrated into a relationship as a tool to enhance your sex life with your partner, rather than damage it.

Pornography, depicting people having sex for the purpose of arousing the viewer, has been around for hundreds, some may even argue, thousands of years. The Internet has made porn so ubiquitous in our society that, these days, pretty much everyone has seen porn of some kind, and most of us have formed our position for or against, based on sexual, freedom of speech, moral judgment or human rights perspectives.

It’s hard to pigeon-hole porn these days. Like everything else, porn is changing and expanding. It’s shifting into a more decentralized industry, resulting in things like better conditions for actors and less abuse. It’s also morphed to include new delivery systems like Live Cam, and Only Fans sites that, in effect, make it possible to get paid to produce porn alone in your bedroom.

Porn will survive and thrive in some form in spite of, or more accurately, because of, our attempts to suppress it.

Even within the latest censorship laws (FOSTA-SESTA) that make it nearly impossible to use the word sex anymore in social media platforms (and that includes the words ‘sex education’), porn will, I have no doubt, remain one of the most sought after subjects on the internet.

When a society suppresses sexuality in the form of porn, it’s probably also suppressing healthy sex education, which is what we see in our schools across the country. Without an open, shame-free forum for sex education, we’re left with the lies and stereotypes that mainstream porn imparts, and it’s showing itself in the sexual challenges of our young people today.

 

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Mainstream Porn is entertainment meant to entice you to watch more of it. If porn was based on real life sex, we’d likely become bored watching it. Why? Because real sex includes things like seduction, touching, and relaxed orgasmic build-up. Sometimes it includes awkwardness, sometimes messiness. Sometimes it’s amazing, and sometimes it falls a little short. That’s the way real sex is.

The delicious nuances that make for great sex can’t be experienced from the outside. These unseen factors are felt between the people who are having sex. Those are intimacy, connection, presence, chemistry and vulnerability. Not exactly click bait material for the ever-decreasing human attention span. An attention span, by the way, that is now equated to that of a gold fish.

So, allow me to differentiate between mainstream porn that makes money from clicks and ads, imparts misinformation, sets us up for impossible expectations, and desensitizes us to reality, and porn that is a potentially useful as a tool to help couples discover and enjoy their erotic desires.

 

Coming Out of the Porn Closet

One of the more common complaints I hear from couples about porn is that one partner is watching it privately, and the other feels judgmental and betrayed.

Understandably, secrecy born out of fear of judgment doesn’t lend itself to a happy, secure relationship. Whether it’s porn or online shopping, if we believe the only way to avoid conflict is to go underground, then it’s time for some honest conversations and agreements.

Coming out of the porn closet may seem scary, but surprising conversations can take place given the right environment. Porn use is just one of the many topics of conversation that take place in my sex and intimacy coaching. If there’s tension between partners about porn, these conversation may hurt a little at first, but the healing that comes with honest sharing, is well worth the initial discomfort.

The reasons behind watching porn are varied, and depend on the circumstances. People turn to porn for all sorts of reasons, from stress release, curiosity, novelty, exploring their desires, as well as dissatisfaction in their sex life. If viewing porn is having a negative impact on a relationship, then both partners need to sit down and really listen to each other, maybe for the first time.

Some couples have never spoken about porn without inflicting shame, blame and judgment on each other. Take away the emotional battering, and a conversation about porn can lead to all sorts of shared insights and perspectives. There’s far more to porn these days than the mainstream, male-focused fare that is so easy and free to find.

I’d like to point out the ways in which porn, in its most ethical forms, can help couples tune in and turn on to online sex. Since porn is here to stay, let’s look at what’s out there, and how to discern between the good, the bad, and the ugly.

 

Ethical Porn in a Largely Unethical Industry

This is what Google says about Ethical Porn. “Ethical porn can be defined as that which is made legally, respects the rights of performers, has good working conditions, shows both fantasy and real-world sex and celebrates sexual diversity.”

You’re more likely to find ethical porn when you move from the larger mainstream porn sites to paid or subscription porn sites that are independently produced and distributed. These smaller productions companies make content that is more diverse, showing a wider range of performers with different body types, different genders and races and different sexual activities. Most importantly, it includes a woman’s perspective, in front of the camera and behind it, and since one in four people who watch porn are women, this is a game changer.

If we’re only exposing ourselves to the same types of people and a limited depiction of what sex looks like, we’re going to severely narrow our own expectations with a real partner, and come to believe that sex only looks a certain way.

Ethical porn also works to produce porn that doesn’t support harmful racial and gender stereotypes. It often shows consent conversations on screen, and underlines the important of pleasure for all involved. Off screen, the working conditions are safe and the wages are fair. In other words the actors have agency and are treated respectfully.

Watching ethically produced productions removes the dissonance that arises around all the injustices commonly found in mainstream porn. Most women I work with do not want to see the misogyny and stereotypes that a lot of male-focused porn promotes, and because these women know very little about alternatives to the mainstream fare, they understandably refuse to watch porn at all. They end up judging their partner’s porn viewing habits. By adding shame into the mix, it can lead to their porn-watching partner choosing secrecy over conflict.

The breach of trust, along with their own disapproval of porn as they know it, will shut down any further conversation about porn, leaving both partner’s feeling misunderstood.

Asking our reluctant partner to explore new styles of porn that might appeal to them is a conversation that requires sensitivity and tact.

 

• Do your own homework first and give them some links to sites that are geared to their sexual style, whether that’s romantic and sensual, or wild and kinky. Let them do their own research without you looking over their shoulder.

 

• Ask them to choose one or two sites that engage their imagination and share them with you, when you have some private time together.

 

• Assure them that your interest in watching porn together is about enhancing your sex life together, not replacing them with fantasies about porn stars.

 

• Talk about the reasons why couples enjoy watching porn together, and share this article with them.

 

Watching Ethical Porn with Your Partner

Here are some reasons some couples may want to watch ethically-produced porn together:

 

• Lack of sexual experience. When a couple hasn’t had many sexual partners, they’re curious about sex. What’s normal? How do other couples have sex? What does pleasure look like with other couples?

 

• By imagining themselves in the roles of the actors, couples can start to enjoy watching their fantasies played out by others before exploring new experiences themselves. If the porn is realistic, it gives them confidence to step into new forms of sexual expression.

 

• Amateur porn introduces us to sex-positive couples who like to make their own porn for others to watch. They teach us that sex doesn’t have to be shameful and hidden. We can empower our relationship to sex by watching others who have found their own empowerment by expressing and sharing their sexuality.

 

• Couples can find novel ideas to expand their erotic menu. Many people will admit that they still have sex the same way they did in high school. Our sexuality can change like any other part of our life. By watching porn together we’re exposed to new sexual styles and energies that evolve how we see ourselves, and how our partner sees us.

 

• Partners can find sexual acts or activities that excite them and then share them with their partner. Kicking off a conversation about things you find exciting isn’t always easy. By doing some solo investigation, we can find porn that turns us on, and share our desires with our partner by watching others enjoy those same activities.

 

• We can learn about our partner’s erotic fantasy life and distinguish between things they want to try, and things they’d prefer to just fantasize about. Liking a certain kind of porn doesn’t mean you have to, or want to, experience it for real.

 

• Diversity in porn includes age. Porn focuses predominantly on younger people, giving the message that older folks either don’t watch porn, want to see younger bodies, or don’t care about sex that much anymore, all of which aren’t necessarily true (at all!)

Many years ago in my own sexual education, I watched porn featuring a couple in their 70s. I was touched by the mood and energy of their lovemaking. They looked extremely relaxed with their bodies, and their relationship to their sexuality was confident and emotionally connected. They laughed, talked during sex, and enjoyed the intimacy of post orgasm in each other’s arms. It depicted sex as a lifetime enjoyment that has no age limit. Now that I’m one of the older folk, I coach many seniors in having fulfilling sex lives.

 

It’s easy to get drawn into porn rabbit holes that aren’t necessarily your bag, and shut you down looking any further.

If you want to explore ethical online porn, here are a few resources to point you in the right direction:

 

Here’s an article in Medium about Lustery, an ethical amateur porn site featuring real couples who love sex.

https://medium.com/sensual-enchantment/why-lustery-is-my-favorite-porn-site-88e01e2e78fa

The website is www.lustery.com

 

Another one is Make Love Not Porn

Here is a Ted Talk given by Cindy Gallop

https://www.ted.com/talks/cindy_gallop_make_love_not_porn

Her website is www.makelovenotporn.tv

 

Here is an article about a senior couple who agreed to star in an Erika Lust film

https://melmagazine.com/en-us/story/why-these-seniors-decided-to-start-making-porn-in-their-seventies

 

Here is an article on Erika Lust, just one of many female porn directors who are changing the face of porn.

https://www.harpersbazaar.com/culture/features/a20471/how-female-filmmakers-are-reinventing-porn-for-stylish-women/

 

Learn about the world of erotica and the power of the written word. You don’t have sit in front of a blue screen to get turned on.

https://www.frolicme.com

 

I hope this opens your eyes to the fact that there’s a wide variety of porn available for those who dislike mainstream porn. Spend a bit of money and support porn that promotes inclusivity, authenticity and sex positivity for all genders.

 

If you want some coaching in how to bring porn into your relationship as a tool for exploration and entertainment, schedule a Discovery Call and let’s talk about what that would look like in your life.

 

You can schedule a complimentary 15 minute Discover Call by clicking here

 

Keep it real.

Stay well and love deeply,

Corinne

 

Relationship and Sexual Empowerment Coaching…

is for the curious at heart, the sexual adventurers, and the lovers who long for more.